Real-time DNA Investigation

Abstract: DNA technology can connect a crime scene profile to a DNA databank reference profile, thereby
identifying a previously unknown suspect to the crime. When this DNA matching process is driven by
police investigations (as in the United Kingdom), criminals can be identified within days, and then rapidly
apprehended. Such a "DNA-led policing" approach can reduce crime by removing active criminals from
society before they can commit more crimes.

DNA laboratory automation has introduced robotic batch processing that can transform biological
specimens into informative data in less than a day. However, the task of human data review,
interpretation, matching and reporting often takes months. To complete DNA investigations within 48
hours, it would be useful to have a computer system that can perform these information processing tasks
(and deliver investigative leads) within several hours.

Cybergenetics TrueAllele® System 3 is an automated computer-based system that interprets DNA
evidence into profiles, matches these profiles against other profiles, and delivers profile and match results
to end-users via Internet. The system can be distributed across multiple locations, with DNA
interpretation, match and reporting occurring simultaneously for different cases on different computers
that share a coordinating database. Doubling the number of interpretation computers halves the
processing time. Once a case's DNA peak information has been uploaded to the TrueAllele database, all
downstream processing can proceed automatically without human intervention.

We have been scientifically assessing TrueAllele System 3 in several real-time DNA investigative
applications. Useful measures for comparing the computer against current manual systems include speed,
accuracy, capacity, information, labor and cost. For property crimes, we have looked at the system's
interpretation, match and reporting of crime scene samples against an offender database. As reported
previously at the 2003 Promega Symposium, the mixture analysis functionality can rapidly infer profiles
from unknown-suspect sexual assault data; these DNA profiles are highly informative (relative to human
review) and can be automatically matched against offender databases. We have also applied the system
to the World Trade Center (WTC) mass disaster, where the problem has analogous elements of inferring
crime scene profiles from the victim remains, forming a reference database of missing person profiles
(from effects and relatives), and matching the victim remain profiles against the reference profiles to
make connections.

This paper introduces TrueAllele System 3 and describes its distributed Internet architecture for DNA
interpretation, matching and reporting. We describe results for our real-time property crime, sexual
assault and mass disaster studies. We present assessment measures that characterize how the system
produces informative identifications in real time. Applying these measures to STR study data, we show
that our fully automated TrueAllele computer system is 1,000 times faster, 1,000 times better and 1,000
times cheaper than the current computer-assisted human alternative. Real-time DNA investigation can
reduce crime, and provide high capacity for eliminating DNA backlogs.